Unique Disaster
by mildlyattractivegroove
Summary: A spinoff of thememoriesfire's "Assured of Certain Certainties." What would it be like if Finn and Quinn were still trapped in each other's bodies five years later?
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: **What follows is a spin-off of thememoriesfire's unfinished body swap masterpiece, _Assured of Certain Certainties_, and explores what might have happened if Finn and Quinn had remained trapped in each other's bodies and run away to New Mexico in January of their senior year of high school.

_Big girls don't get afraid of the dark, Lucy._

She flipped on the light over the sink and braced her hands on the edge of the counter as she worked to steady her breathing. It was one thing to wake up in the darkness and not know where you were, but to not know _who_ you were? That was something else entirely.

There had been nights like this, back in Lima, where Quinn had woken up panting and rushed for the mirror, terrified at the prospect of seeing Lucy's face staring back at her. Nowadays, though, she didn't know which reflection she should hope for, which face would settle the sickness in her soul.

Inhaling deeply, she tightened her grip and looked up into the glass. There was no denying the stubble on his chin, the twin freckles on his left cheek, or the fact that the pair of eyes staring back were deep brown, without the slightest hint of gold or green.

"Lucas," she sighed, but not with relief. Not exactly.

On the bedside table behind her, her phone blinked with a dozen and a half missed calls from _Vanessa_ she'd have to return eventually. She knew he was probably terrified, given their history, but she just wasn't ready to talk about it the way he'd want to, not yet. And she definitely wasn't ready for him to know where she was. Sitting down on the bed, she picked up the phone and tapped out two words she hoped would settle his nerves:

_I'm ok._

It wasn't the first time she'd done this, run out on him for a few days, just to get her bearings back. Just to see who she could be without him and the mess they'd made together shackled around her ankles. But it was the first time she'd ever truly considered not going back.

The day before, she'd been on her way home from Albuquerque with the cd case in her lap, the plastic wrapping rustling with every bounce of her knees. They'd agreed to do it this way, to forego iTunes and get the real deal. They needed something tangible, some little piece of _something_ they could touch and possess, however trivial it may be.

Years ago, she'd memorized the route to New York, the roads she might one day take up and out of her self-imposed New Mexican exile. She'd imagine herself driving into the sunrise, wailing along with the radio to some old country tune about "goin' home to your darlin'."

It was all just a fantasy though, and she knew it. There was no home—no _one_—to go home to. Rachel had probably stopped waiting for Finn to come back long ago, and she'd never been waiting for Quinn.

And who was Lucas to Rachel? Nobody. A stranger dressed in familiar flesh. That was all.

Nevertheless, on that December afternoon, with Rachel's face staring up at her from her lap, the list of roads came back to her in a whisper, and she'd driven right past her exit for La Cienega and crossed the border into Colorado.

Setting her phone back down next to the still-unopened cd, she sank into the bed and closed her eyes, desperate for sleep. But something about the feeling of the sheets on her skin, the smell hanging in the air, kept pulling her thoughts back toward that night almost five years ago, the night they'd run out of options and fled Lima for good.

The _Wuthering Heights_ audiobook had gotten them through the first leg of the drive without having to speak to one another.

But that night she'd woken up sobbing into some sour-smelling mattress in a motel just like this one on the Missouri-Oklahoma border where he'd stowed them for the night, screaming at him to take her back. And when he'd reached to try and quieten her, she'd jerked back violently against him, elbowing him hard in the cheek. He'd managed to hold onto her anyway, and it made her stomach lurch at the reminder of how small he was in her body, and how difficult and awkward it felt for him to try to curl himself around her.

It had occurred to her then, that if he'd given it even a minute's worth of thought, he'd have figured it out, the reason why she'd wanted to go back so badly, the only thing she had left to go back for. But instead, he'd just mumbled sleepily and held onto her as tightly as he could while she'd thrashed and wailed and tired herself out, and she'd fallen asleep again with him pressed up firmly against her back.

In the morning, the bruise she'd given him had already begun to ripen into a purplish black, and even though at the sight of it she'd felt a flash of guilt over having hit _a girl_, there had been something so oddly gratifying about seeing her pain painted so blatantly on her own face. It was a feeling she immediately realized she'd have to tamp down, the overwhelming desire to hurt him, just so she could watch her own body suffer.


	2. Chapter 2

Hours later, she awoke to the sound of her phone buzzing with a message from Vanessa telling her to be careful and stay safe. She had to laugh a little at that. Even though she'd tried her best never to let it show, she'd never truly felt safe in Ohio. Little Lucy had been plagued by nightmares, constantly fearful of monsters and other intruders, and later on, the leering looks of Midwestern men had terrified a teenaged Quinn.

But personal safety wasn't high on the list of Lucas's concerns, not anymore anyway. It had taken her a while to realize that no one was interested in messing with a six-foot-three former jock, but once she had, she'd found it tremendously freeing. Now _Vanessa_ was the one who couldn't go out at night alone without getting hassled. But whereas Quinn had had only a barbed tongue for protection, Vanessa had no qualms about throwing a punch.

There was a sudden peal of laughter from outside, and she looked out the window to see two little girls running around in circles in the parking lot, dressed in matching coats and hats. One of them flashed a toothy grin in her direction, and she jumped, the blinds slipping through her fingers and clattering shut. For a split second, she lost her breath, her balance, and she stumbled back across the room toward the sink to fill one of the little paper cups on the counter with cold water.

It still happened like this from time to time, the sucker punch of female ghosts slipping their way through Lucas's male body, leaving her light-headed and winded. People probably thought Lucas was some kind of pervert, the way his eyes would sometimes glaze over when a young girl would walk past. But it was just that the body called Lucas was sometimes still haunted by the twin spirits of Lucy, the little girl with auburn pigtails and perpetually bruised shins, and Quinn, whoever she had been.

Sometimes on the street, without warning, these spirits would take hold, and suddenly the male posture Lucas had spent so much time perfecting would falter. A hip would jut out to the side, and before she could help it, Lucas would be walking down the sidewalk with the same swaying gait Quinn had used to take the halls of McKinley by storm.

Moments like that were beyond frustrating for Lucas, who'd put as much focused effort into his masculinity as Lucy (and later, Quinn) had put into being feminine. Lucas studied John Wayne and James Dean the way Lucy had studied Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. And just as Quinn had worn her yellow dresses on Mondays and never left the house without at least a light coating of make-up, Lucas took care to keep his shoes polished and his face clean-shaven.

But neither performance had been perfect, and she was left wondering what it meant to be unable to successfully enact either gender.

There was another reason, too, why the sight and sound of giggling girls had a tendency to send her reeling, though she could hardly bear to admit it.

Beth was almost seven years old by now, probably close to the same age as those girls outside running rings around her parked car.

Quinn had spent so much time fretting over the traces Beth had left on her body. Every stretchmark and scar a grim reminder of the violence wrought by pregnancy and childbirth, of her own misspent girlhood being torn at the seams. There were times she'd even prayed for a second skin, a fresh, blank canvas she could slip over herself to conceal all the evidence of her shame.

But now Lucas longed to look down and see those silvery white lines webbing across his abdomen. And even all these years later, the instinct would still come at times to put a hand down over the place, low in her belly, where she'd carried Beth inside herself in those long, grey months of her pregnancy. But Lucas didn't have a womb, and running his fingers across the skin where one might be left her feeling cold and empty.

Vanessa was the one who bore all those traces now, the only connection Quinn would ever have to the little girl growing up as Shelby Corcoran's daughter. _Vanessa_, who had only a vague notion of the gravity of the marks on her skin, of what it might mean to carry someone else's life inside your body.

She sat down on the bed and ran a hand through her hair. Lucas's stomach growled loudly, and she realized she hadn't eaten since leaving New Mexico. On the way in, she'd noticed a diner down the block from the motel, but she desperately needed a shower first. There was a change of clothes in her car for just such situations, but she had forgotten to bring it in with her in her exhaustion when she'd arrived.

It was with nervous steps that she crossed the room again and peered out the window once more. To her relief, she saw the little girls were gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Showered and dressed in a clean, if wrinkled, set of clothes, Lucas cautiously edged his way into a booth at the back of the diner. The waitress who seated him had flashed him a sympathetic smile and let her hand linger on his as she promised to be right back with a menu. Lucas was always inspiring that sort of reaction in others, especially women. It was as if they knew somehow, without him saying a word, that something had gone amiss with him somewhere along the way.

She mostly assumed it was that they thought Lucas was gay, which was disconcerting for a number of reasons. For one thing, she hated the attention, no matter what the cause, could go a thousand years without another pair of eyes focused on her and be perfectly happy. And secondly, it tended to get in the way of the fact that, for all the facets of Lucas of which she was still unsure, one thing was certain: Lucas liked girls.

She remembered how, in the first weeks after it'd happened, she'd convinced herself that it was all just part of the aftermath of the swap. Some lingering trace of Finn's desires leftover inside his body, the way _the thing_ had lurched and responded to Rachel's every move. It was "science, sort of," or so she'd told him, and he'd probably start liking guys, too, right?

Wrong.

Over the years, she'd come to accept that _the thing_ was more like some horrible truth barometer, like Pinocchio's nose, but in reverse, incessantly, _embarrassingly_ growing and _pointing_ and forcing her to be honest with herself about what it was she really wanted. And for that, it was a smug little bastard, _the thing_, so proud of itself for making apparent what had always been part of her, somewhere, though she'd done everything she could possibly think of to work her way around it.

Lucas frowned and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. When the sad-eyed waitress returned at last, he ordered a cup of coffee, toast, and two strips of bacon. It wasn't Quinn's tea and yogurt, but it wasn't Finn's whole hog, bonanza breakfast either. Lucas was constructed out of compromises like that, arrested somewhere in the balance between Finn and Quinn, even though neither of those people had existed for some time, or were likely to ever exist again.

Quinn had been the first to go, at least on paper anyway. About a year after they'd settled in New Mexico, they'd made the change, each taking a new middle name for the other to go by. She'd smirked, thinking of Santana, when she picked the name Vanessa for him, but he'd just shrugged saying, "I can pull that off. 'Vanessa' sounds like she could be a kickass lesbian drummer, right?"

And he'd picked Lucas for her because of its similarity to Lucy and because, he said to her complete surprise, he'd read somewhere that St. Luke was the patron saint of artists and surgeons.

And just like that, they became Finn Lucas and Lucy Vanessa. _Quinn_ had fallen away completely, or so it seemed.

But there were parts of her managed to remain, and those that did, remained with a vengeance. Quinn's moods still coursed through Lucas, all her old anxieties and self-loathing sliding through his veins like some bitter, paralyzing serum, making it impossible for Lucas to make any sense of himself.

It wasn't like that for Vanessa, or if it was, Finn hadn't shown any sign of it. It was almost as if the whole name change had given him the boost he need to just give in and try to make a go of it. And as the weeks went by, he started to _delight_ in experimenting with Vanessa, in fashioning together, bit by bit, the kind of girl she might be.

In the beginning, Quinn had been amused by the whole thing, watching him blindly fumble his way through womanhood like some hapless St. Bernard puppy. He'd go out on these day-long thrift store adventures (he'd begun to insist on shopping for Vanessa's clothes on his own), and emerge from his room dressed in some cartoonish version of the outfits the girls had worn for that _Livin' on a Prayer_ number.

"Why on Earth are you dressed like that?" Lucas had asked, bemused.

Vanessa had just shrugged, tugging at her collar. "I don't know. I figured this is how rocker chicks dress, right?"

And Lucas couldn't help but laugh a little, even if he was still a little horrified at the prospect of seeing _Quinn's _ body leave the house that way.

But as time went on, as things with Vanessa shifted and softened, Lucas found himself stricken with an infuriating combination of jealousy and curiosity as she watched Vanessa evolve in a way she knew Quinn had forever missed out on.

She was used to living a sham. After all, hadn't Quinn been just that: a fraud, a con, a pretty little lie that helped everyone around her sleep more soundly at night? But Quinn had also been on the precipice of something, just before the swap. A change vastly more meaningful than the adolescent plot to put Lucy on a diet and hide her under makeup and dresses. Yes, Quinn had been on the verge of something that Vanessa was getting to live on the other side of. And so _Lucas_ just felt like an interloper, some purgatorial stop on the way to whatever it was she had almost become.

And that was the way she continued to wear him, five years later, like some heavy, wet blanket thrown over her mid-leap.


	4. Chapter 4

It was hard to know how _Quinn_ would have evolved, if she ever would have discovered that part of herself, and, if she had, whether she would have let it live. In a way, it sometimes felt to Lucas like a blessing that the swap had made whatever Quinn's "coming out" process would have been both unnecessary and, though Lucas couldn't seem to tame his curiosity about it, _irrelevant_. Quinn had been spared the incurable panic that would have settled in her bones after that inevitable drunken girl-kiss that would no doubt have happened at some lame party her freshman year of college.

And that was a mercy, to be sure.

But most of the time, especially as the years in the "post-swap" column began to tally up, he couldn't help but feel that Quinn had been robbed, too. That whatever trajectory she might have taken, whatever the consequences would have been, at least they would have been real, and they would have belonged to _her_.

That loss—Quinn's defeat—hadn't truly registered with any of them until the night of Vanessa's first date with another woman. It was a few months after the name change when Vanessa had come home from work and said she was going out to dinner with a girl she'd met at the garage.

"Like a date?" Lucas had asked.

"Um, yeah. I mean, I think so."

For a fraction of a second, Quinn had been there, in Lucas, her acid tongue pressed against the back of his front teeth, ready to snap out a sharp refusal. And then, just as quickly, she was gone again, not having said a word. Winded, Lucas had gone into his room, settled down with a book, and tried to tune out the sounds of the shower running and Quinn's disembodied voice breaking through a slightly-sharp rendition of "I Can't Fight This Feeling."

When, a bit later, Vanessa had popped her head in to ask if Lucas would help her get ready, Quinn asserted herself yet again, and her first instinct was to send the book in Lucas's hands flying at Vanessa's face.

But on second thought...

It was the first time in _ages_ Vanessa had offered her access to the body she'd foolishly expected to spend her whole life in. She didn't own that body anymore, couldn't control where it went, who it came into contact with, what happened to it. But at least this way she could perhaps give it a proper send-off.

So she'd gotten up from the bed and followed Vanessa into her bedroom. There on the dresser was the yellow bag that had once held all of Quinn's makeup. She'd eyed it possessively, longing to feel the once-familiar brushes and pencils in her hands.

"Can you do something with my hair?" Vanessa had asked, snapping Quinn from her thoughts before she could reach for the bag.

"Like _what_?" Quinn had scoffed.

"I don't know. Put one of those braid things in it like you used to do or something?"

In spite of herself, Quinn had climbed onto the bed behind Vanessa and began combing her fingers through Vanessa's hair. It was soft, and still a little bit damp, and from Lucas's superior vantage point, she could see auburn strands just beginning to sprout from the crown of Vanessa's head.

"Your roots are starting to show. You should have dyed it before your hot date," she'd said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

"I was thinking about just letting it grow out. That bleach stuff really burns my scalp, man."

The first tear fell before Vanessa had even finished her sentence, and suddenly, without warning, Quinn was sobbing into Vanessa's hair. She'd felt like a fool, the way she was pressing the strands to her face and blubbering like a baby over something so small. With everything she'd lost and survived, the prospect of Lucy's natural hair color making a reappearance should have been such a trivial thing.

But it was just that up until then, her blonde hair had been the only thing about Quinn that Finn had carried over to Vanessa without alteration. It was the last trace of the girl she'd spent years painstakingly making herself into, only to have lost her in an incomprehensible instant. And now this last vestige was to be lost, too.

"Hey, hey," Vanessa had said, turning, the strands of hair slipping from Lucas's fingers. "I didn't know you'd be this upset. I'll call off the date if you want."

_Oh, right. The date. She'd almost forgotten._

"Don't be ridiculous; I'm fine," Quinn had said, frantically wiping the tears from Lucas's face. "I just...I think I should go back to my room."

"Are you sure?"

She hadn't answered. Just got up and went back to Lucas's room.

A little while later, Vanessa had appeared again. She was wearing a blue dress with a little white cardigan, something not so much unlike what Quinn would've—

"You look...very pretty," Lucas said, cautiously.

"I'm kinda nervous," Vanessa admitted.

There'd been something about the sadness in those eyes, Quinn's eyes, that sent a twinge of guilt through Lucas's chest; he couldn't look away.

"I shouldn't have been so hard on you," he'd said absently.

"Well, I don't want to be late," Vanessa had replied, after a moment. "You'll be here when I get back, right? I mean, you won't..."

There had been no doubt what she'd meant. Lucas knew Vanessa was taking a mental inventory of their medicine cabinet.

"I'll be here; I promise," he'd said.

But it hadn't been an easy promise to keep.

For his part, Lucas didn't date, and it wasn't just because women always assumed he was gay; it was that _she_ was. Even if Quinn was gone forever, the ghost that lingered in Lucas was very much _a girl_ attracted to _other girls_, and the prospect of dating them _as a man_ had limited appeal.

Over the years there had been a few innocent flirtations that lead nowhere. And then came the thing that happened just after their twenty-first birthdays. The thing they agreed never to speak of again.

They'd been drinking for hours in some La Cienega dive, when Vanessa had suggested off-handedly that they bring someone home _together_.

It was a testament to how drunk Lucas was that he hadn't bludgeoned her on the spot, but instead just asked, "Have you lost your mind?" with a raised eyebrow.

"No. I'm just tired of watching you let my junk go bad," Vanessa whispered.

Lucas gripped the bottle in his hands a little tighter and reconsidered breaking it over Vanessa's head.

"I've been taking care of..._that_...just fine on my own."

"You need to get a girl on that thing," Vanessa slurred. "I mean, aren't you even curious?"

It was difficult to say exactly how they got from that moment to falling indelicately onto Finn's unmade bed, some brunette wisp of a thing pressed between them, but for Quinn, the path had been lined with torturous, unwanted memories, Finn's incessant nagging, and at least a fifth of scotch.

"I don't understand why you think that your being there will help," Quinn had said at some point.

"I don't know. Maybe seeing yourself...I mean, seeing me..._like this_...will make you more comfortable, right?"

At first it made no sense, but then she'd had some more to drink and it had made perfect sense; then, no sense again. And then it didn't matter because a hand was fumbling with the button of her jeans, and her first instinct was to bat it away. She'd felt this exact feeling once before, the spinning of the room combined with presumptuous fingertips grazing the flesh beneath her belly button.

She was ashamed to admit that she could never remember that moment of penetration with any sort of clarity. That fatal first thrust that had been the beginning of the end of everything she'd ever dreamed for herself. There'd just been _not there_, and then suddenly _there_, and then it was all over except for the unyielding ache that settled in the following morning and the tiny, familiar stranger that had been pulled from the rubble nine months later.

It was then that _the thing_ lolled drunkenly against her thigh, reminding her that everything about this time was different.

Once or twice, in those first angry months of her pregnancy, she'd haphazardly wondered if having one would somehow make her feel more powerful. Now, it just made her stomach turn, the weight of a responsibility she'd never asked for hanging heavily between her legs.

She had no frame of reference for what the proper etiquette might be in a situation like this, but she needed to shift the focus away from herself in order to get her bearings back, if such a thing were even possible. So, delicately, she lifted the all-too-nimble fingers from her waistband and pressed them to her lips before nudging the stranger onto her side to face Finn.

She closed her eyes, pushed herself up to sit against the head of the bed, and drew in a deep breath.

What she saw when she opened her eyes again—

She had had dreams like that before, Quinn and Rachel tangled together. Only she _was Quinn _in those dreams. Now, in the swirling haze of Finn's bedroom with _the thing_ weakly making its presence known, she realized she was very much outside of Quinn's body, and that Quinn's body wasn't _quite _Quinn, and that the girl whose hands seemed to be groping every place on Quinn's torso at once wasn't _quite_ Rachel.

Even so, it was the first time she really got a sense of how it might have looked, how her fingers would have traced the delicate curve of Rachel's spine; how her eyebrows would have furrowed at the sensation of teeth nipping their way down her jawline.

There was a faint gasp, and she saw _not-quite-_Quinn's mouth drop open. It was then that she noticed the tan hand working its way under the skirt of Vanessa's dress. The truth of what was happening flickered through her thoughts, and though her stomach twisted uncomfortably, she couldn't manage to look away. She _needed_ to know what would happen next, how she would have looked, would have felt, if-

It was beautiful.

It was horrifying.

It was infuriating.

Out of nowhere came a growl, and suddenly she was prying them apart.

"It's not fair!" she heard a man's voice shouting. "Do you hear me? It's not fair!"

She had Vanessa by the shoulders then, gripping her so hard that bruises would tell the tale for weeks afterward, and it wasn't until she saw the terror in those hazel eyes, heard that raspy voice shout back, "Dude! Dude! It's just me! Calm down!" that she realized _who she was._

There was a mad scramble for the bathroom then, the upheaval of stomach contents, and when there was nothing left, the chest-wracking sobs of a body too dehydrated to properly form tears.

Lucas had no idea what Vanessa had said to the girl, how she'd gotten rid of her that night. And when the two of them finally started speaking again, the only thing they'd said about it was, "Never again."

And yet, from time to time Lucas still had visions of Quinn's face that night, her hands...

Back at the motel in Colorado, Lucas looked down at his broad, rough palms, his calloused fingers.

_Manhands_, he thought, with a laugh that quickly broke into a strangled cry.


	5. Chapter 5

Like Quinn, Lucas liked to keep the pieces of his life neatly packed away in little boxes, though the boxes now existed (for the most part) only in his mind. But from time to time he'd unpack them, sifting through the memories as if they were stacks of photographs taken of someone else's life.

It was easier that way, just as it was easier to think of Lima as _Quinn's_ home, the place where she'd invented herself, destroyed herself, lost herself. A place, and people, didn't have anything to do with _him_.

Or so he tried to believe.

He was still sometimes haunted, though, by the image of Judy Fabray's face, how it must have flickered for a moment with panic and then fallen with quiet resignation on that January morning she awoke to find Quinn gone. Lucas didn't know what was worse: that Judy had only just realized in the weeks before they'd left that she actually loved her daughter, or that the daughter she'd come to love after all those years had actually been _Finn_.

Oddly enough, it was even harder for Lucas to think of Carole. Poor, sweet, open-hearted Carole. At least Quinn knew Judy couldn't be broken, not really. She'd just pour some scotch on the wounds and soldier on like always. But Lucas had a feeling Carole would probably never get over it. She'd always be thinking of her lost boy, wondering where he'd gone and what had happened to make everything go so wrong. Aside from _Rachel_, that was probably the part that made Lucas feel the most regret, the thought of Carole and Burt bankrupting the garage, destroying their own lives, desperately searching for someone who couldn't be found, who didn't even exist anymore, despite all appearances to the contrary.

As far as he knew, though, no one had ever come close to finding them.

He'd plot out little scenarios in his head, sometimes, of what those first few days after the escape must have been like: Brittany trying to explain to a stoic Santana about the "Finn suit." Santana allowing herself a small empathetic smile at what she had to guess was a story Brittany had made up in a well-intentioned effort to make sense out of the senselessness of it all. He knew everybody probably blamed their disappearance on Quinn. Maybe they even thought she'd gotten herself knocked up again, and rather than face the repeated shame, had scurried off in the night, dragging poor hapless Finn along with her. Kurt was the only one who really knew the truth, but she doubted he'd stand up for her. Why would he, when she'd never been bothered to show him the same kindness?

But that last night in Lima? Those last moments with Rachel? That was a box best left untouched. The one other time he'd let himself go through it, he'd woken up in the hospital, alone and terrified. When he was discharged, Vanessa brought him home again, but they didn't speak for three days. And during that time, he made herself believe that he'd somehow known she'd spent that night chasing muscle relaxers with scotch to visions of Rachel, and that that was why he'd been so angry. It was just easier to accept his jealousy than to even begin to think about how badly she'd scared him, how pissed he was at her for trying to leave him again.

At some point during her stay at the Hudson-Hummel house _as Finn_, Carole had said to her that all that mattered was doing the right thing, even if it was months down the line. It had occurred to Quinn at the time that Finn had probably been raised on sentiments like that; it explained a lot about his complete willingness to screw things up and his ridiculous, blind faith that everything would eventually work out. But it ran totally counter to the Fabray philosophy in which the wrong thing, once done, was all that mattered, regardless of how many right things you tried to do to make up for it.

Still, Lucas wanted to believe that what Carole had said was true. Because for all the mistakes they'd made, they'd done the right thing, eventually, in leaving.

Lucas hoped that, somehow, that would make some sort of difference in the end.


End file.
